Google has pushed out a new version of Play Books with material design, but it's not just a different look. Version 3.2 might change the way you read books on your device. It certainly looks nicer, but you can also easily skim through a book with a flick.

What’s New

The first things you'll notice are the use of the colored status bar, new animations, and a redesigned navigation menu. When you're reading a book, tapping in the center no longer just brings up an action bar. It now zooms out to show pages as a filmstrip that you can slide through. There's also the usual progress slider at the bottom to jump around. It's a neat interface.

Download

The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.

Comments

rmkilc

Wait for it... THE NAV DRAWER DOESN'T FOLLOW THEIR OWN GUIDELINES!!

ThatBabyAintMine

Like seriously, they make a cool hamburger-to-arrow animation icon for nav drawers but their official guideline is for the drawer to hide that animation. I don't blame anyone that chooses to not have the drawer cover the action bar just so users can see that pretty animation.

Alfredo Hernández

It's stupid not to follow the guidelines for the sake of showing a minuscule animation. Yeah, it's cool and all that, but come'on.

pleaseAnswer

so... what's the point of the animation ?

Anthony Castanza

The answer is that the animation is not supposed to be used for the action bar menu button. The correct implementation is demonstrated in the search box of the Google Search app.

Alfredo Hernández

Dunno, sincerely. Just Google how cool they are.

Anthony Castanza

That is not where the animation is supposed to be used. The nav drawer is supposed to slide over the action bar, and in that case the hamburger button is supposed to be static (or employ the button-press ripple effect). Open the google search app and tap the search box, that is where the menu>arrow transition animation is use properly, and for other cases like that. Not the action bar.

Aaron Berlin

I just miss the little spinning material "back" arrow whenever I can't see it!

rmkilc

Me too, but more importantly, whatever method is "correct", it needs to be implemented that way across the board!

ThatBabyAintMine

The inconsistent nav drawer/action bar combo strikes again!

Nate

This is the correct implementation. As per Roman Nurik, and the guidelines.

I get it, you really want what was shown at I/O....gut feeling is you'll never get that app (at least not from google). Current play music follows most of the MD guidelines and nothing in any of the other apps they've designed dictates going away from a predominately white app with an (orange) accent color. Sure, there will be added animations, but i don't see it changing much more.

I hope Keep itself will get folders or other way to group my notes.
And pleeease, my greatest dream is to see correctly working (case insensitive) search! I mean, by characters on my language while search by English characters is case insensitive already. Web version of Keep has great working search on all languages, by the way.

Out of those apps:
Google news and weather has got a half lollipop style to it thanks to a massive 2.0 update
Google search, Calendar, Gmail are all material designed on Lollipop
But most of the apps that have been updated are actually either:
a) half lollipop
b) Inconsistent (e.g. with the action bar at the top)

Kaleb Peters

There's also Google Play Sound Search; otherwise I'm moving back to Shazam.
And My Tracks, which I hope will get merged with Google Fit.

Awesome

Ha. The people who are getting upset about the hamburger menu not matching.

I think it should be dubbed "hamburger-gate" as soon as possible. Then the lynch mob can have something to chant whilst holding their pitchforks and torches.

Well, looking at the last preview for contacts application, it's not going to be like this. At least not in this version. I don't know if they have a new gallery with transitions and so but judging by the filtration of the Nexus 6 image (which has been ported to Nexus 4) it doesn't seem to be the case either.
Given that those two applications don't update over Google Play right now we will have to wait until Android 5.1 to get them, if we get something similar at all.

The Contacts app is already materialized, doesn't look as good as the mockup though :/

Kévin Cocchi

What I love the most with this material update is that it's the first one in which the text selector has been revamped for all the versions, which is pretty cool.
And yet, Google added one more brick to the inconsistency ... Even the arrow animation is not the same. Come on Google, just do as in the Google I/O app everywhere !

DeadSOL

I can't adjust the margins now.

JPB

I'm really enjoying these Material updates for Android, but would like to see more of them show up on the web apps as well. I like "Inbox" as its updated, but the whole Play Store on the web (and the circa 2011 designed Chrome store) really need an update.

Looks like this update fixes how Google Play Books manages epub files as well. Before, all the books that I uploaded that had footnotes wouldn't function properly (i.e. footnote links that would display in other epub readers would never display in Google Play Books).